I want to tell you a story about stories
and I want to tell you this story
because I think we need to remember that
sometimes the stories we tell each other
are more than just tales or
entertainment or narratives
they're also vehicles for sowing
inspiration and ideas across our
societies and across time storm about to
tell you is about how one of the most
advanced technological achievements of
the modern era has its roots in stories
and how some of the most important
transformations yet to come
might also story begins over 300 years
ago when Galileo Galilei first learned
of the recent Dutch invention that took
two pieces of shaped glass and put him
in a long tube and thereby extended
human sight farther than ever before
when Galileo turned his new telescope to
the heavens and to the moon in
particular he discovered something
incredible these are pages from
Galileo's book Siderius nuncius
published in 1610 and in them he
revealed to the world what he had
discovered and what he discovered was
that the moon was not just a celestial
object wandering across the night sky
but rather it was a world a world with
high sunlit mountains and dark Maur a
Latin word for seas and once this new
world and the moon had been discovered
well people immediately began to think I
have traveled there and just as
importantly they began to write stories
about how that might happen and what
those voyages might be like one of the
first people to do so was actually the
Bishop of Hereford
man named Francis Godwin Godwin wrote a
story about a Spanish explorer Domingo
Gonzales who ended up marooned on the
island of Saint Helene in the middle of
the Atlantic and there in an effort to
get home developed a machine an
invention to harness the power of the
local wild geese to allow them to fly
and eventually to embark on a voyage to
the moon
Godwin's book the man on the moon or a
discourse of a voyage thither was only
published posthumously and anonymously
in 1638 likely on account of the number
of controversial ideas that it contained
including an endorsement of the
Copernican view of the universe that put
the son of the center of the solar
system as well as a pre Newtonian
concept of gravity that had the idea
that the weight of an object would
decrease with increasing distance from
Earth and that's to say nothing of his
idea of a goose machine that could go to
the moon and while this idea of a voyage
to the moon by goose machine might not
seem particularly insightful or
technically creative to us today what's
important is that Godwin described
getting to the moon not by a dream or by
magic as Johannes Kepler had written
about but rather through human invention
and it was this idea that we could build
machines that could travel into the
heavens that would plant its seed and
minds across the generations the idea
was next taken up by his contemporary
John Wilkins then just a young student
at Oxford but later one of the founders
of the Royal Society and John Wilkins
took the idea of space travel in
Godwin's text seriously and wrote not
just another story but a nonfiction
philosophical treatise entitled
discovery of the new world in the moon
or a discourse tending to prove that tis
probable there may be another habitable
world in that planet I know by the way
that word habitable that idea in itself
would have been a powerful incentive for
people thinking about how to build
machines that could go there in his
books Wilkin seriously considered a
number of technical methods for space
flight and it remains to this day the
earliest known nonfiction account of how
we might travel to the moon other
stories would soon follow most notably
by Cyrano de Bergerac with his lunar
tales and by the mid 17th century the
idea of people building machines they
could travel to the heavens was growing
in complexity and technical nuance and
yet in the late 17th century this
intellectual progress effectively ceased
people still told stories about getting
the moon but they relied on the old
ideas or once again on dreams or
magic why well because the discovery of
the laws of gravity by Newton and the
invention of the vacuum pump by Robert
Hooke and Robert Boyle meant that people
now understood that a condition of
vacuum existed between the planets and
consequentially between the earth and
the moon and they had no way of
overcoming this and way of thinking
about overcoming this and so for well
over a century the idea of a voyage to
the moon made very little intellectual
progress until the rise of the
Industrial Revolution and the
development of steam engines and boilers
and most importantly pressure vessels
and these gave people the tools to think
about how they could build a capsule
that could resist the vacuum of space so
it was in this context in 1835 that the
next great story of space flight was
written by Edgar Allan Poe now today we
think of Poe in terms of gothic poems
and tell-tale hearts and ravens but he
considered himself a technical thinker
he grew up in Baltimore the first
American city with gas street lighting
he was fascinated by the technological
revolution that he saw going on all
around him he considered his own
greatest work not to be one of his
Gothic tales but rather his epic prose
poem Eureka in which he expounded his
own personal view of the cosmic
graphical nature of the universe and in
his stories he would describe in
fantastical technical detail machines
and contraptions and nowhere was he more
influential on this than in his short
story the unparalleled Adventures of one
hunts fall it's a story of an unemployed
bellows maker in Rotterdam who depressed
and tired of life this is Poe after all
and deeply in debt he decides to build a
hermetically enclosed balloon borne
carriage that is launched into the air
by dynamite and from there floats
through the vacuum of space all the way
to the lunar surface and importantly he
did not develop the story alone for in
the appendix to his tale he explicitly
acknowledged Godwin's a man on the moon
from over 200 years earlier as an
influence calling it a singular and
somewhat ingenious little book
and although this idea of a balloon
borne voyaged the moon may seem not much
more technically sophisticated than the
goose machine in fact Poe was
sufficiently detailed in the description
of the construction of the device and in
terms of the orbital dynamics of the
voyage that it could be diagrammed in
the very first space flight in sequel
encyclopedia as a mission in 1920s it
was this attention to detail or to
verisimilitude as he called it that
would influence the next great story
Jules Verne's from the earth of the Moon
written in 1865 and it's a story that
has a remarkable legacy and a remarkable
similarity to the real voyages to the
moon that would take place over a
hundred years later because in this
story the first voyage to the moon takes
place from Florida with three people on
board and a trip that takes three days
exactly the parameters that would
prevail during the Apollo program itself
and in an explicit tribute to Poe's
influence on him Verne situated the
group responsible for this feat in the
book in Baltimore at the Baltimore Gun
Club with its members shouting cheers
for Edgar Poe as they began to lay out
their plans for the conquest of the moon
and just as Verne was influenced by Poe
so too would Verne's own story go on to
influence and inspire the first
generation of rocket scientists the two
great pioneers of liquid for rocketry in
Russia and in Germany Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth
both traced their own commitment to the
field of space flight to their reading
from the earth of the moon as teenagers
and then subsequently committing
themselves to trying to make that story
a reality and Verne story was not the
only one in the 19th century with a long
arm of influence on the other side of
the Atlantic HG Wells is War of the
Worlds directly inspired a young man in
Massachusetts Robert Goddard it was
after reading War of the Worlds that
Goddard wrote in his diary one day in
the late 1890s arresting while trimming
a cherry tree on his family's farm and
having a vision of a spacecraft taking
off from the valley below and descending
into the heavens and he decided then and
there that he would commit the rest of
his life to the
development of the spacecraft that he
saw in his mind's eye and he did exactly
that throughout his career he would
celebrate that day as his anniversary
day his cherry tree day and he would
regularly read and reread the works of
Verne and of Welles in order to renew
his inspiration and his commitment over
the decades of labor and effort that
would be required to realize the first
part of his dream the flight of liquid
flow rocket which he finally achieved in
1926 and so it was while reading from
the earth to the moon and the war of the
worlds of the first pioneers of
astronautics were inspired to dedicate
their lives to solving the problems of
space flank and it was their tree
disease and their works in turn that
inspired the first technical communities
and the first projects of spaceflight
thus creating a direct chain of
influence that goes from Godwin the poem
to Vern to the Paul program and to the
present-day communities of spaceflight
so why have I told you all this is just
because I think it's cool or because I'm
just weirdly fascinated by stories of
17th or 19th century science fiction it
is admittedly partly that but I also
think that these stories remind us of
the cultural processes driving space
flight and even technological innovation
more broadly as an economist working at
NASA I spend time thinking about the
economic origins of our movement out
into the cosmos and when you look before
the investments of billionaire tech
entrepreneurs and before the Cold War
space race and even before the military
investments and looking for rocketry the
economic origins of space flight are
found in stories and in ideas because it
was in these stories that the first
concepts for space flight were
articulated and it was through these
stories that the narrative of a future
for Humanity in space began to propagate
from mind to mind eventually creating an
intergenerational intellectual community
that would iterate on the ideas for
spacecraft until such a time as they
could finally be built this process has
now been going on for over 300 years and
the result
is a culture of spaceflight it's a
culture that involves thousands of
people over hundreds of years because
for hundreds of years some of us have
looked to the Stars and longed to go and
because for hundreds of years some of us
have dedicated our Labor's to the
development of the concepts and systems
required to make those voyages possible
I also wanted to tell you about Godwin
Poe and Vern because I think their
stories also tell us of the importance
of the stories that we tell each other
about the future more generally because
these stories don't just transmit
information or ideas they can also
nurture passions passions that can lead
us to dedicate are alive to the
realization of important projects which
means that these stories can and do
influence social and technological
forces centuries into the future I think
we need to realize this and remember it
when you tell our stories we need to
work hard to write stories that don't
just show us the possible dystopian
paths we may take for a fear that the
more dystopian stories we tell each
other the more we plant seeds for
possible dystopian futures instead we
need to tell stories that plant the
seeds if not necessarily for utopias
then at least four great new projects of
technological societal and institutional
transformation and if we think that this
idea that the stories we tell each other
can transform the future is fanciful or
impossible and I think we need to
remember the example of this our voyage
to the moon an idea from the 17th
century that propagated culturally for
over 300 years until it could finally be
realized so we need to write new stories
stories that 300 years in the future
people will be able to look back upon a
remark how they inspired us to new
heights and a new Shores how they showed
us new paths and new possibilities and
how they shaped our world for the better
[Applause]
[Music]